Project Subversion Source Code

The Subversion sources are now under revision control in a Subversion repository. The CVS repository is obsolete (you can browse the old CVS ChangeLog online here.) To obtain Subversion now, you should:

  1. Download the latest tarball distribution from the Downloads Page

  2. Build and install it according to the instructions in the INSTALL file in the top level of the distribution. You will end up with a 'svn' binary in the subversion/clients/cmdline/ directory (or installed in /usr/local/bin/, if you ran 'make install'.)

  3. Use it to check out the newest Subversion source: 

          $ svn co http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk -d subversion

    That will get you a new working copy directory named `subversion/', containing the latest, bleeding-edge source.

    4. (Some people have reported DNS lookup errors for `svn.collab.net'. The IP address is 216.127.237.133, in case you should need it.) 

  4.       cd subversion
      svn status
      svn update
      etc, etc, etc...

  5. Now you have a working copy. Most commands work like you would expect. Many of them have bugs, or misconfigured defaults. Many features are missing. Please make sure you're subscribed to dev@subversion.tigris.org if you're going to run this.

    Here's a hint: read the introductory SVN for CVS Users paper on the Docs page. It should help.

  6. Generally, you should always rebuild and install Subversion from your working copy (read the INSTALL and HACKING files). The latest available tarball is still not as recent as an up-to-date working copy. The tarballs are just there to help people bootstrap, and (eventually) to provide stability checkpoints.

  7. Read the Warnings and Inconveniences Page for information about some particularly annoying bugs and their workarounds.


Contributing To The Project

To contribute to Subversion:

  • Join the developer community mailing lists: (see the Members page.)
  • The Subversion project more-or-less abides by the guidelines used by the Apache APR project. Please review these.
  • After checking out a copy of the source as described above, read the file HACKING at the top of the tree. It describes coding and logging conventions, as well as how to build from a working copy.